Back to School With a Battle of Chalk

Content Notes: Racism, sexism, alt-right politics

Chalked political messages on the sidewalks is against the rules at DePaul University, but that isn’t stopping the College Republicans. During the spring last year racist messages chalked on the Lincoln Park Chicago campus created such a toxic atmosphere that the school decided to ban political chalking from campus grounds. Many of those chalkings were supportive of Donald Trump’s campaign during the primary, and came after conflicts over racism on the University’s Facebook page and suggestions from the Black Student Union about ways to make campus safer for students of color.

Not long after that, at the end of a school year full of racial conflict and prejudice at DePaul University, the College Republicans group on campus invited hate-monger Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus. His talk was met with protests in which students of color managed to break into the room and occupy the stage on which he was speaking. This lead to an angry mob of his followers heading out onto campus and violently attacking protesters. The president of the school, Father Dennis Holtschneider, handled this incredibly badly, basically blaming the students who protested Yiannopoulos and apologizing to the College Republicans group. The uproar in response to this letter likely contributed significantly to Holtschneider’s resignation soon thereafter. He is still president of the school, but DePaul is searching for his successor.

The school year ended with a noose hung at the entrance of the Sanctuary Hall Dormitory.
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Back to School With a Battle of Chalk
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Why I Went To College

Next week I will begin the last year of my undergraduate degree. Not my fourth year, but my tenth. Not at age 21 or 22, but at 34 years old. I will be 35 when I graduate. When I graduate it will have been exactly a decade, down to the week, since I first entered a college classroom as a student. It’s been a long path, but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I did not go to school to get a better paying job, though I hope that will be a nice side-effect. I had a reliable job (which I hated) that I left to go to school full time. I also didn’t go in order to get some specific job that I wanted. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what my major would be for quite awhile.
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Why I Went To College

Remote Sensing, Not Remote Viewing

When I mentioned to friends that I was going to be taking a class in remote sensing this quarter, many were baffled. “Wait… Benny… WHAT?!” they asked. I understood immediately what the confusion was. No, I assured them, I don’t think I’ve become psychic.

Remote viewing is the term used for the belief that people can use clairvoyance to perceive and learn about places, objects, or people that they cannot sense directly. It is a psudoscientific belief and process with absolutely no evidence to support it and flies in the face of all known science. Despite this, research into it was invested in by militaries around the world, including the United States Army. This is NOT what I am studying in college.
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Remote Sensing, Not Remote Viewing

Just Keep Doodling

Sometimes I notice that a lot of my classmates sit in class, body still, hands still, looking to the front of the room, in what appears to be full attention. Setting aside the texters and chatters (less common in my classes now that I’m an upperclassman), there seem to be a lot of attentive, if quiet, students. They may or may not participate in class conversation, but their whole quiet bodies exude polite attention.

To me this looks like a superpower. If I want to actually absorb anything said in class I cannot do that. I can sit still, but it takes so much of my attention to do so that my mind wanders and I miss important parts of a class discussion or lecture. Actually looking at the instructor the whole time is difficult in a way that’s hard to explain, even though I don’t normally have trouble looking at people in social situations. I need to do something else with my hands and my eyes in order to follow the lecture.

My stimming doesn’t look much like stereotypical autistic habits, though I have been known to hand-flap when very excited. Instead, I have drawn the same patterns down the edges of my notepapers in class since middle school. I buy nice pens in many colors in order to do this in the most satisfying way, with bright colored uni-ball Vision pens having the best feel and color saturation. My notes ALL look like this, from 6th grade Social Studies through college Ecology courses. I take notes too, of course, but the rest of the time I am carefully drawing my patterns over and over.

Image is of a diagonal checkerboard pattern in red and black along the edge of a loose leaf sheet of paper in a 3 ring binder.
Image is of a diagonal checkerboard pattern in red and black along the edge of a loose leaf sheet of paper in a 3 ring binder.

These days I also use fidget toys in situations where doodling my lines isn’t feasible, such as sitting in talks without desks or tables. My favorite fidgets are hard plastic movable toys. They need to be very quiet and have as smooth of a texture as possible. I particularly love the Jeliku Toy and Tangle Jr. These aren’t as good as doodling though, which just seems to open up my ears and calm my mind like nothing else. I definitely learn best when I can doodle my lines.

There’s good reason to let autistic learners stim in ways that allow us to learn better. If we’re spending energy trying to repress our habitual stimming behavior, that is energy not going to learning. I am lucky that I have had very little trouble in college with professors questioning my doodling, but it definitely got negative attention from teachers in middle and high school, who saw it as a sign I wasn’t paying attention. In fact, I’m often the first student to respond to questions in class, and I participate enthusiastically in class discussions, so I don’t think my professors worry that I don’t know what’s going on – they realize pretty quickly that even though I’m not looking at them, I’m hearing everything they say.

Just Keep Doodling